It’s finally election day!
I wish I could say that, after today we’ll know who our next President is and we no longer have to discuss all the BS but, if Trump’s 2020 election was any indication, the BS is just beginning. The key difference is, of course, that Trump is not the sitting President this time so a lot of the nonsense he pulled in the last election (which didn’t work) won’t fly but, on the on the other hand – he did appoint 11 more Federal judges (and one Appellate judge) AFTER losing the last election – so you never know…
Like it or not, there’s really nothing more impactful on the markets than the election. Even Fed Chairman Powell’s JOB hinges on the election results as he recently defied Trump’s demand not to lower rates before the election – as Trump felt it gave an advantage to Biden (at the time). Powell did lower rates 0.5% on Sept 18th but it certainly did not boost the economy. In fact, rates now are 0.7% HIGHER than they were at the time – it was an extremely ineffective rate cut. Â
In fact, yesterday’s 3-year note auction went off at 4.152% – MILES higher than the Sept 10th auction at 3.44% and the Oct 8th auction at 3.878%. A whopping $58Bn was auctioned off and this was about as close to a FAILURE as you can get without actually failing to sell all the bonds. Mounting US debt may finally be finding the limits to demand.
Direct Bidders (US-based) fell from 15.7% to 9.6% while Indirect Bidders (Foreign Entities) rose to 70.6% from 66.5%. In other words, our fate is not longer in our hands as we are depending on the rest of the World to shoulder our $600Bn MONTHLY debt burden UNLESS, of course, we balance our budget and…. I’m sorry, I’m laughing so hard I can’t even finish that sentence…
Neither candidate, in fact, has made much of an effort to balance the budget. Harris’ Economic Plan is forecast to add $4Tn to our $36Tn National Debt (happy $40Tn!) to the debt and 4% interest on $40Tn is $1.6Tn PER YEAR in debt service alone. Trump’s plan runs our debt up $8Tn, to $44Tn – not really much difference if he’s telling the truth but could climb to $16Tn ($52Tn total, $2.08Tn in annual interest) if his trickle down BS doesn’t work (the way it hasn’t worked since – ever). Â
Not only is NEITHER candidate addressing our massive existing debt or projected deficits or rising debt service costs but BOTH candidates are ignoring the $2Tn of spending we SHOULD be doing to combat Climate Change for the next 20 years in order to save the planet.Â
Trump’s solution remains simply pretending Climate Change isn’t happening – despite melting mountains of evidence to the contrary. Harris’ solution is to keep doing the halting steps that Biden has taken – way too little, way too late at that pace. Â
This chart is so depressing I don’t even want to discuss it. You can read about it here but the bottom line is we’re already at 1.5 degrees – we blew our chance to avert that when Trump abandoned the Paris Climate Accords in 2017 (one of his first acts in office). It’s not like we had a good chance of avoiding 1.5 degrees anyway – but now we are talking about 2.5-3 degrees and that pretty much insures tremendous sea-level rises, a lack of fresh water, diminishing biodiversity and, of course, loss of crops that are likely to lead to mass starvation. Â
There may not be any cats and dogs left to eat! Â
There was an episode of Star Trek (TNG) called “The Inner Light” where Captain Picard lived the life of a man on a dying planet. I highly recommend it for perspective on where we’re heading and HOPEFULLY, under Harris, we can begin to make a little progress on averting that fate for our planet but under Trump, with $1Bn of oil money already in his pocket – well we may as well just party like it’s 1999 – because we’re passing the point of no return, only 24 years after we rejected Al Gore and his whiny environmentalism and 18 years after we laughed at “An Inconvenient Truth.”
This is our future we’re voting for. It’s not just Trump – it’s the judges he will appoint until there won’t be a court in the land that will say “stop” to the people who add to this mess. There will not be a court that allows you to tell Corporations NOT to destroy the planet – those rights are being stripped away from you and your children, one by one and we don’t have 200 more years to win them back. THIS is the time to take a stand for the future of our planet.
4 years from now it will be 2028 and the next President will take office in 2029 and, EVERN IF they have both houses of Congress behind them – it will still take many years to change the courts and even more time to reverse course on climate and then it will be 2034 and we will have done NOTHING but just try to get back to the mess we have now and the costs will have doubled or tripled while we’re run our debts well over $50Tn and run the clock down to just a few decades before all of those indicators are in the red.
THAT is what this election is about – just the fate of the planet Earth…
Vote early, vote often!
— Phil
